


empty promises, empty promises

by patrokla



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Bitterness, Character Study, Fix-It, Gen, M/M, Post-Canon, Post-Episode: s04e13 No Better To Be Safe Than Sorry, in which the author projects a great deal, wandering towards that direction anyway
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-03
Updated: 2020-01-12
Packaged: 2020-02-16 12:16:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18691336
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/patrokla/pseuds/patrokla
Summary: Two months and four days after Quentin dies, Eliot sees him in the bathroom mirror.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is not a fic I meant to write! I'm not even sure if it's an entire fic or just a part of one - really depends on if anyone wants to see more. 
> 
> Warnings: references and continues almost directly on from the fuckery of the season 4 finale, minus the whole 'Margo and Eliot go back to Fillory' bit for reasons that should be obvious. A lot of long sentences.
> 
> Title from the Mountain Goats' ["Flashing Lights"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANCIAeNE5dU) \- this really isn't the fic I meant to use these lyrics for either, but again, here we are. Shoutout to the grad school papers I'm avoiding that make all this procrastination-induced fic writing possible.

Two months and four days after Quentin dies, Eliot sees him in the bathroom mirror.  
  
He’s shaving, in an attempt to prove to Margo that he _is_ semi-functional, thank you very much, and also to look a little less like the Monster, whose unkempt scruff and greasy hair is easy to make out on more than a few security camera recordings of gruesome murders. Alice had promised him that the Library would take care of his currently Wanted status, but until then, he was lying low, trying to heal from a gut wound and - if he’s being honest with himself, which he unfortunately fell into the habit of being while stuck in his own mind - a broken heart.  
  
A broken heart. It sounds like a cliche, it is a cliche, the whole fucking situation is a huge cliche. Man dies before his ex-husband of fifty years has a chance to confess his love - well, the details aren’t cliches. But the broad outline is pretty fucking familiar to anyone who bothered to flip through any work of 20th century gay literature, which Eliot…mostly hasn’t, or to anyone who bothered to watch Brokeback Mountain, which Eliot definitely has. Once. And then never again, because he was a teenager, in Indiana and he was alone and terrified and so, so angry.  
  
He’s angry now, when he has the energy to be. It’s not like he expected a happy ending (he’s never, ever expected a happy ending), but he never thought he’d wake up in his own body after months and months and find that Quentin was gone. Permanently.  
  
None of them had really believed it was permanent at first. After all the times they’d died, collectively, it seemed absurd that Quentin could really be gone. Even Penny 40 wasn’t really gone - as evidenced by the fact that he’d been the one who’d shown up and told them that Quentin wasn’t coming back.  
  
“And y’all have to stop trying to get him back,” Penny had said, looking upsettingly sympathetic immediately underneath the usual thin veneer of impatience. “My boss gave me a fucking day pass back up here just to tell you that, because he doesn’t think you believe he’s gone.”  
  
Eliot still doesn’t believe it, not really, but he can tell that everyone else is starting to. And why not? They all have things to get back to. Margo’s trying to get her eternal banishment lifted so she can get back to Fillory, Alice had gone off to run the Library less than 12 hours after Quentin’s memorial, and Kady was unionizing the fucking hedge witches. Julia had gone back to Brakebills, presumably followed by Penny 23, and even Josh had something to do, fluttering around with pastries and helping Margo ‘do research.’ Everyone else had beaten the post-grad school employment statistics by finding full-time work immediately, and meanwhile Eliot was just hanging around trying to get fired from his temp job of ‘healing’ and ‘getting better.’  
  
He’s never been good at healing, but he can shave, so - he’s doing that, in the giant mirror in the biggest bathroom of what was apparently Marina from another timeline’s apartment, and is now Kady’s.  
  
And then Quentin shows up in the mirror.  
  
Eliot might scream, briefly, and there’s really no shame in that - if ever there was a time to scream, it’s when the visage of your dead never-lover shows up six inches away from your face, looking very upset. Later, when Eliot starts to obsessively turn the encounter over in his mind, he’ll classify Quentin’s face as ‘extremely distraught’, but in the moment, covered in shaving cream, Eliot can only think _Q_ and _upset_ and _holy fucking shit_.  
  
Quentin’s there, staring right at him with huge eyes, mouth opening on a sob, hair too short, and then he’s gone. Eliot realizes in the sudden emptiness of the bathroom that he’s cut himself on the razor, blood mixing with the shaving cream. He keeps shaving, hands on autopilot as he watches the mirror, hoping and fearing that Quentin will reappear. But he doesn’t, and eventually Eliot finishes and grabs a spelled-hot towel to press against his face and breathe shuddering breaths into, one after another, until the cut on his cheek stops bleeding and he feels remotely able to walk out of the bathroom and tell Margo.  
  
—  
  
The apartment is split in half over whether or not they think Eliot actually saw Quentin and not some grief-induced mirage. Margo is on his side, thank God, but Alice had shown up for the first time in weeks just to be furious at him. He’s pretty sure she’s really just furious at herself, and feeling guilty (as she should, says the biggest, angriest, meanest part of him, she let him go in there, she let him -), but that doesn’t mean he’ll just sit there and take it while she talks about how he has to let things go and move on.  
  
“I know what I saw,” Eliot tells her tersely for the tenth time.  
  
“I know what _I_ saw,” Alice rejoins, and Eliot can feel himself flushing with anger and absurd jealousy and deep, unending sadness at the idea that she had seen Quentin die, at the idea that Eliot hadn’t. “I know what I’ve read in his book,” Alice continues. “An ending. A shitty ending, but an ending. His book is _finished_ , Eliot.”  
  
The argument is cut short when he tries to stand up to gesticulate at her and almost topples over from the sudden wave of pain in his abdomen. Margo bullies him out of the living room and back to bed, watching him inscrutably while he settles under the blankets.  
  
“El,” she says quietly, and he looks up at her. She looks tired, so tired, when did they all get so tired?  
  
“It was him, Margo,” he tells her, “I know it. I felt it.”  
  
“Fine,” she says. “I believe you. Now get some rest, okay? Try to spend at least a couple hours not staring into a mirror.”  
  
“I will, Bambi,” he says, and he means it, truly, but that doesn’t stop him from levitating the full-length mirror in the corner of the room over to the wall right across from the bed.

He falls asleep in-between begrudging blinks, waiting to see Quentin again.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eliot sees Quentin a second time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Didn't mean to write a second part to this, but it is finals and I am stressed, so here we are! There'll probably be a third part. 
> 
> Kinda just hand-waving my way around the Fillory time-jump stuff.
> 
> Warnings: continued discussion of Quentin's death in 4x13, Eliot being in a bad place mentally, and a surfeit of commas.

Eliot sees Quentin for the second time in Fillory.

He’s in Castle Whitespire for what’s shaping up to be a very short visit, but had been intended to be something more permanent. Something to do with time jumps, and Fen now having several hundred years of experience as a ruler under her belt, and Margo not having the place she thought she would have - he’d tried to pay attention for her sake, but the details have slipped away quickly. He can still hear Margo shouting, even through the heavy wooden doors to the armory.  
  
At least it had been an armory, back when Eliot had first been crowned High King. He still remembers finding it empty; more significant is his memory of Quentin coming to sit by him on the dais, crown in hand. Eliot remembers their embrace, and thinking with heavy certainty _I will never see him again_ , even as he knew with something lighter and brighter that he would.  
  
But that had been three years, fifty years, or three hundred years ago, depending on who was counting. At some point the room had been converted into quarters for a court magician, and now all the trappings of the armory are long-gone. A few of the bookshelves remain, but the majority of the space is taken up by a low, narrow bed, a chair and writing desk, and a full-length mirror.  
  
Eliot eyes the mirror avidly, as he’s done with every mirror since that morning two weeks ago. For the sake of his mental health, he should probably be avoiding mirrors. He definitely shouldn’t be sitting half-hunched on an uncomfortable bed, staring at dusty glass. There’s a long clear streak down the middle of the mirror that Eliot had made, wiping the grime off with a handkerchief.  
  
He sees his alleged self in the mirror. There are deep circles under his eyes, which he can’t quite meet. He’s had a full makeover, for Kady, Julia, and Penny 23’s sakes as much as his own. They’d all been pretty thoroughly decent about the fact that they'd been terrorized for months by a god wearing his body, but none of them could help the occasional jumps and flinches when he’d walked into the room looking Monster-esque.  
  
So he’d taken advantage of magic, once again on and flowing freely, to run through his old regimen of grooming spells, trimming and shaving and moisturizing until he looked almost like he had back at Brakebills, before he’d ever met any of them. Before he’d met Quentin. It’s ironic that after all that work to make them comfortable around him, he can barely look at himself. His carefully crafted armor feels more like a facade than it ever had before, and the grooming spells feel like a bad joke. Something only made possible by Quentin’s death.  
  
He refuses to call it a sacrifice, even in his own mind. By all accounts, it had been totally unnecessary ("I don’t understand why he didn’t _run_ ," Alice had said, in the few hours that they were on speaking terms. "I don’t understand why he made me watch him -").  
  
Eliot knows Quentin - knew? Knows, surely - Quentin is gone, but Eliot’s knowledge of him remains, a throbbing, painful thing that’s a piece of Eliot as much as his own muscles and tendons. He has known Quentin for a very long time, and so when Alice had told them all what had happened, her voice a bare whimper, Eliot had known the answer to the question she was asking.  
  
Under other circumstances, in another time, before the Mosaic, before Fillory at all - in those brief months at Brakebills, when Eliot had seen Alice as a rival, he would’ve held the fact of that knowledge over her head. He knew Quentin better than she. Ha! Take that, little Miss Magic. He knew Quentin, and he’d _fucked_ Quentin - all together, it was as sweet a victory as someone like Eliot could hope for.  
  
But they were years removed from that time, and Eliot was very far removed from that old Eliot, the one barely held together by wanting and whiskey and Margo’s steadfast presence. The thought of lording his particular understanding of Quentin’s mental health over her makes him feel sick, although that feeling is a pale imitation of the deeper nausea that’s taken up permanent residence in his gut. Maturity, maybe, but something else as well. Grief recognizing grief. If there’s any satisfaction to be had in knowing that he understands Quentin in ways she never will, it’s obliterated by the fact of Quentin’s absence.  
  
Quentin’s alleged absence, anyway. A permanent one, according to Alice. According to Quentin’s book, not that Eliot puts much stock in _that_ \- he remembers the two volumes of his own life sitting on a Library shelf and finds it unlikely that he’ll even finish out the first one, without Quentin.  
  
Without Quentin…  
  
Eliot feels, for the first time, a sliver of uncertainty as he watches the mirror. Maybe Alice is right, maybe Quentin’s appearance was merely a manifestation of his own denial of Quentin’s death. But then again, maybe her refusal to entertain the possibility that Quentin, the most determined person Eliot’s ever known, would find some way to hold on, even when part of him didn’t want to - maybe that’s her own way of coping with it all. Eliot wouldn’t judge her for it (much), except he knows that if she’d treat it seriously, and help him try to figure it all out, they’d get there a lot faster than Eliot currently is on his own.  
  
He could use a sign, frankly. And maybe he’d sought out this room deliberately, thinking it’d somehow stir something - he doesn’t know how the mirror realm works, doesn’t know if Q’s even there, but he’d thought that the dais, heavy with memory and magic, might trigger something.  
  
“Or maybe not,” he mutters into the empty room, and so of course it’s then that Quentin appears, tenaciously perverse even in fucking limbo -  
  
It takes a second for Eliot to burst into a flurry of action, shouting for Margo as he wipes swathes of the mirror free of dust with his sleeve, handkerchief lost when he’d jumped up from the bed.  
  
He can see all of Quentin this time, in the full-length mirror, and he looks, fuck, he looks as awful as he’d looked before. His face is crumpled into a sob again, hair still short and lank, but this time Eliot can see his chest heave and his shoulders jerk as he cries. His wonderfully familiar, compact body looks diminished in an all-black outfit Eliot doesn’t recognize, and his fingers are curled against his palms, the pressure of nails against skin only slightly cushioned by the overlong sleeves of a black hoodie.  
  
He’s staring at Eliot with grief and - and disbelief, maybe, his expression mirroring Eliot’s aching heart. Eliot presses his hand against the glass, and Quentin sobs again, and Eliot just wants to _hear_ him, wants to _touch_ him, wants to grab his hand and pull him away from where he’s trapped and back to life, back to Eliot’s side where he belongs.  
  
Instead, he can only watch. The heavy doors swing open just seconds before Quentin vanishes, not even long enough for Margo to finish saying Quentin’s name, sounding shocked. Eliot turns to face her, feeling like his strings have been cut. Abruptly, all the aches and pains of his body return, the still-healing wound in his gut the most insistent - he'd clearly pulled something when he’d gotten up from the bed. Underneath the pain, he feels completely hollowed out by Quentin’s brief reappearance.  
  
Margo helps him sit down on the bed again, sitting next to him and carefully wrapping her arms around him. He lowers his head onto her shoulder, returning the embrace with hands that shake and press too tightly into her back. She doesn’t protest, though, just brings a hand up to his newly-cropped hair and runs her fingers through it. They rock together for a moment, breathing through the feelings that had overwhelmed Margo in a moment, that Eliot has been submerged under for weeks.  
  
“Fuck, that was really him,” Margo says, pulling away just enough to look him in the eyes. The hand stroking his hair stays there, keeping him in that moment and away from the moment when he’d seen Quentin cry and been completely unable to help him.  
  
“We have to-“ he starts, voice thick with suppressed tears, and Margo shushes him.  
  
“We’re gonna go find Alice, and we’re gonna figure this out,” she tell him firmly.  
  
He watches her locking it all back down, and wonders if this is how she’d been while he was possessed - making plans, in complete control of her devastation. He loves her so much, more than anyone on their two planets but Quentin, and suddenly the space between them feels unbearably heavy and wrong.  
  
Margo pulls him back into a hug, quick and fiercely strong, then gets up.  
  
“Come on,” she says, holding out a hand. “We’ve got work to do.”  
  
“Have I ever told you I’d be lost without you, Bambi?” he asks, standing up with a wince.  
  
“Oh, I’m aware,” she says dryly, and he almost smiles.  
  
Before he leaves the room he looks back at the mirror, smeared with the dust he’d tried to wipe away, and smudged with his handprints. Part of him is relieved to see his own tired, black-clad body in it instead of Quentin’s. Next time he sees Q he wants to be able to hold him and keep him, wants to run a hand along his back until Quentin’s sobs have gentled and he can breathe again.  
  
He looks away and tries to feel the certainty he’d felt all those years ago, watching Q leave him there in Fillory. His head has doubts, but his heart beats more steadily. It whispers _next time, next time, next time._


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eliot’s not entirely surprised to learn that his previous ban from the Library, for burning Mike’s book, has been reinstated by Alice. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh hello...I'm back from the Goldfinch and ready to be extremely bitter about the Magicians for another season, and this is my Bitter Fic, so...here we are. How's everyone else doing?

Eliot’s not entirely surprised to learn that his previous ban from the Library, for burning Mike’s book, has been reinstated by Alice. 

“I can’t trust you not to burn Q’s book,” she says, arms crossed, standing in the cavernous foyer of the Neitherlands branch. 

“Jesus,” Margo says, with just the thinnest thread of restraint in her tone, “he’s not gonna burn Quentin’s book. We’re trying to save him, not erase him.”

Alice tilts her chin up and folds her arms even more tightly over her chest. 

“It’s too risky,” she says. “That’s my final decision. If you want to take it up with anyone, you’ll have to appeal the board of directors. And I can promise you that they won’t say yes. They’re familiar with his history.”

Eliot tries to make eye contact with her for the tenth time since he and Margo had arrived, and fails again. She’s staring resolutely past him, at some invisible point in the wall. 

“Zelda is currently our interim director,” she adds, and Margo snaps, “Yeah, no shit,” and walks away in frustration. 

“Alice,” Eliot tries, “We’ve both seen him. He’s trapped, and he needs our help. Brakebills doesn’t have the answers, Kady’s hedges sure as fuck don’t, and Julia won’t even talk to us about him.”

“Smart of her,” Alice says, eyes finally flickering over to meet Eliot’s. 

“No, it isn’t,” Eliot says, working his jaw a little to try and keep himself from shouting. Or begging. “We _saw_ him, Alice.”

Alice bites her lip, then stops like she’d done it unconsciously. She stares right at him, then over at Margo. Eliot is struck by how little she’s changed, outwardly, since her first year at Brakebills. Still an ice queen, still brilliant, still on guard against the whole world. Her hair isn’t flat-ironed within an inch of its life anymore, falling in soft pale curls per the Library style. But she’s iron and ice, almost all the way through. Eliot tries to figure out how to slip between the layers, how to reach the part of her that cares about Quentin and the rest of them. He knows it’s in there, somewhere.

“You’re wondering why you haven’t seen him,” he guesses, and her gaze jumps back to him with magnetic quickness. “Why he’d appear to me, and not you. To Margo, and not you.”

Her mouth is very, very tight. She gives one sudden, jerky shrug that might as well be a nod.

He smiles at her sympathetically, and doesn’t quite lie as he says, “I don’t know either. But that’s why I need your help. We have questions only you and the Library can answer.”

Margo snorts faintly behind him, and he ignores it as he uses his last move. 

“If there’s even a chance, Alice…” he starts, and the waver in his voice is, like his words, not quite a lie. 

She’s smart enough to see through it all, of course, but the pleading is just a foot in the door. She’s smart enough to hear the logic in his argument as well. _What do we have to lose? We’ve already lost him._

After a long, long moment, she sighs.

“Fine,” she says, like he knew she might, but still hadn’t been sure she actually would. “Fine. Come on, before someone sees you and throws you out.”

“Glad you’re finally seeing the benefits of trying to save your fucking boyfriend,” Margo says.

He and Alice both wince at that, something Margo deigns to ignore as she pushes past Alice and through the doors. Alice shakes her head and sighs again, the gestures minute, like they’re meant only for herself, and then she follows Margo. Eliot takes a moment to steel himself, something he seems to need to do constantly, these days, and goes in after them.

—

The Library is even quieter and less populated than Eliot remembers it being, all those years ago. Alice tersely informs them that she and Kady are trying to hammer out an arrangement to get the hedges library cards, but it’s still a work in progress. 

“We have some trust to rebuild,” she says, which is a contender for understatement of the century.

Margo snorts derisively, but she and Eliot both stay quiet as Alice leads them through the stacks. They go further and further into the impossible depths of the Library, until the low noise of the few librarians left is imperceptible, and the air around them feels a little thicker, the light a little dimmer. 

Finally, she comes to a stop in front of a shelf that looks identical to every other shelf they’ve passed, but feels - different. Wrong. Eliot doesn’t want to look at the books on it directly. He wants to grind his teeth together, wants to scratch his skin to alleviate the itching sensation crawling across it. Margo seems to feel it too, her mouth in a deep frown, and but Alice seems almost unaffected. Her spine is straight, her shoulders are set, and Eliot watches her ruthlessly suppress a flicker of discomfort with a kind of admiration. 

“These are all the books we have on the Mirror World,” she tells them.

“We never mentioned the Mirror World,” Margo says, looking mildly suspicious.

“It has to be connected,” Alice says, crossing her arms. “He’s showing up in mirrors after - after _dying_ in the Mirror World. This is the best place to look.”

“Something tells me you’ve already started looking.” Margo raises an eyebrow at her, and Alice shrugs jerkily.

“A little,” she admits. “It was the first thing I did, after. But I didn’t know what I was looking for. I was just trying to find…it doesn’t matter. We have leads now.”

There’s a table and chairs just past the shelf, metal furniture that Eliot knows will be particularly unforgiving on his wound, but he can’t bring himself to care about that pain. It overwhelms him, yes, and often, but it has nothing on the depth of the wrongness he feels all the time, occupying space without Quentin. 

“We need a mirror,” he says, and Margo gives him an uneasy, skeptical look from over the stack of books she’s already pulled.

He gives her his best Resigned But Determined stare, which she concedes to with a nod after a few long seconds. Neither of them are exactly looking forward to seeing Quentin like that again, but it can only help with their research.

Alice, of course, has disregarded their conversation entirely and is already casting what looks like a fiddly variation on Herrod’s Relocation. She eyes the heavy, oak-framed mirror that appears in mid-air a moment later critically, then casts the spell again. An awfully familiar-looking chalkboard appears next to the mirror; as Eliot watches, _Q Mirror Appearances_ is scrawled across the chalkboard by an invisible hand. 

“I think that’s it,” Alice says, finally. “Now, tell me everything. In detail.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A sob breaks the hold Quentin has on him.

Time moves slowly in the Library, but time spent researching books that might-could-maybe-fucking _should_ have answers about Quentin passes at a truly glacial pace. The slowness is visceral, minutes dripping down Eliot’s spine as he recalls every detail of his encounters with Q for Alice. The metal furniture is making his body ache, Alice’s constant disapproval is setting him on edge, and Margo’s rapid-fire page-flipping provides an uneasy, percussive soundtrack to the isolated corner of a nightmare he’s found himself in. 

Once he’s told Alice everything, and she’s begun poring through books alongside Margo, a foot of space between their elbows that might as well be impermeable, he drinks. He’d enchanted another flask the second he’d had a minute alone in the Brakebills infirmary, spelled away from Fogg’s private stash, and he hasn’t yet regretted it.

He drinks just a little, enough to blunt the edge of his anxiety. Enough to leave his mouth bitter. Enough to leave him distracted, and so it’s Alice’s cracked, “Q?” that has him turning to see Quentin in the mirror. 

He’s seen it twice, but he’s still not prepared for the absolute devastation on Q’s face. The way he shudders, soundlessly, shoulders curling in, eyes opening to stare right at Eliot.

The look pins him, shoves a hand in his wound and digs in with sharp fingernails. It’s hard to breathe, the sorrow pouring off of Quentin feels like it’s going straight down his throat, and he can’t look away, he can’t look away, he can't ever look away.

A sob breaks the hold Quentin has on him. For one wild second he thinks it’s coming from Q, but no, it’s Alice, trying to choke back another sob as she casts a spell Eliot doesn’t recognize, staring at Quentin as her fingers fly through the air.

He looks back at the mirror just in time to see Quentin judder, tears sliding down his face, and then vanish, as silently as he’d come.

“Fuck!” Alice falls back into her chair and buries her face in her hands, taking a ragged breath.

“What the fuck was that,” Margo snaps, looking furious. “Why didn’t you tell us you had a spell ready?”

“I didn’t know if it would work,” Alice says, looking up at her. “I couldn’t finish it, but I think -“

“Right, and making it cooperative wouldn’t have helped with that at all,” Margo says. “Jesus, Alice, if you could trust us for two goddamn seconds -“

“You didn’t trust me! You didn’t tell me -“ she looks at Eliot, for the first time since Q’s disappearance, and her eyes are wide and wild. “He was looking at you the whole time.”

Eliot can’t make sense of her words at first, can practically see Quentin’s face in front of him still, torn open with grief.

“I was the one in front of the mirror,” he says, finally, voice inexplicably hoarse.

“No, he was looking at you when he appeared. He never,” she has to pause and swallow something down, before she can continue. “He never looked at me. Or Margo. He was watching you.”

—

There’s exactly one living person Eliot has told the Mosaic about with any detail, and she sits next to him as he tells the story again, trying to explain to Alice why Quentin might be looking at Eliot and not his - girlfriend. 

“He was in love with you,” Alice says, looking down at the ground. She’s been pacing almost since Eliot opened his mouth, arms crossed, hair falling over her face. 

He doesn’t blame her. He doesn’t want to make eye contact either.

“In Fillory,” he says weakly, “here, it’s…more complicated. I don’t know.”

“No, it makes sense,” Alice says. “That’s why he wouldn’t give you up, why he was willing to let the Monster kill him to save you. It makes sense. God, I was so _stupid_. I was so -“

She continues to pace, head down, until Margo takes pity on them all and breaks the silence.

“Alice, did you get anything useful from that spell? Any idea where Q’s coming at us from?”

“Sort of,” Alice says, finally slowing and snapping the fingers of one hand to inscribe half the chalkboard with a diagram that resembles some of the more torturous proofs Eliot had worked with in some Dimensional Theory course.

“He’s in the Mirror World, but he’s not just there. I’m not sure, I couldn’t get the whole picture before he disappeared, but there’s traces of him on Earth, too.”

“Well, what now? We wait until he shows up again and try to get through the spell together?” Eliot winces at the idea, feels exhausted at the mere thought of having to seeing Q like that again.

“That shit could take weeks,” Margo says. “We need a plan.”

Alice bites her lip, then glances at them. 

“I have an idea, but I don’t think you’ll like it.”

“I think it’s fair to say I don’t like any of this,” Eliot says. “Just lay it on us.”

“Well,” Alice says, “I think you need to go to the Underworld.”

Margo opens her mouth to snarl something that Eliot assumes is along the lines of “fuck that idea with a telephone pole,” but Alice continues before she can really get into it.

“Quentin’s book says he moved on,” she says, “but he clearly hasn’t. That means - well, I’m not sure what it means, but whoever was supposed to help him move on should know why he didn’t go. Why he’s in multiple worlds, and -“

“Alive?” Margo suggests, and Eliot takes a sharp breath. It’s one thing to know that Quentin is still here, somehow, but if he’s alive, unquestionably, truly alive -

“I don’t know,” Alice admits. “He’s not dead, but there are so many things in between.”

Her gaze turns distant, and Eliot wonders how many of those things she had met as a niffin. If she knows more than she’s letting on, if Quentin is beyond saving, and he and Margo are just being enlisted to figure out the cause, so the Library can write it down.

It’s a deeply unfair thought, but he thinks it, and feels relief in the way it turns inward and jabs at his own heart. Here, in the cavernous disquiet of the Library, books of lives that have ended lining so many shelves, it feels foolish to hope. He searches for the glimmer of certainty he’d felt in Fillory, and catches it in flashes. Quentin’s eyes fixed on him, never looking away. It has to mean something. Everything they’ve gone through - it has to mean something.

“I’m up for anything that’ll get me away from these books,” Margo announces, and Alice gives her a small, firm nod. 

“I can get you passes to the Underworld branch,” she says. “Whenever you’re ready.”

“We’re ready,” Margo says, immediately, and Eliot loves her for it.

“Born ready,” he murmurs, and Alice grimaces in a way that resembles a smile, or possibly vice versa. 

It feels - it _should_ feel desperate. The Underworld, and only the barest outlines of a plan with no guarantee of success. On the long list of bad plans he's participated in, it's close to the top. And yet there it is, jolting him when he thinks of Quentin, slipping across his fingers like a fish with no real chance of escape. Slippery, but solid.

Hope. 

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on [tumblr](https://leguin.tumblr.com) and, allegedly, [dreamwidth](https://patrokla.dreamwidth.org/).


End file.
